Archive for the ‘cross-platform campaign’ tag

Everything in life is a learning experience, but sometimes it seems that social media campaigns can teach us particularly frustrating lessons. You can meticulously research best practices for campaigns in your industry across social platforms, and still get results below expectation. That doesn’t mean that campaign was a complete failure; it’s just telling you that your customers, fans, and followers don’t fit neatly into the best practice mold.

So take this opportunity to meld any best practice suggestions with what you’ve learned to be true about your audience. How? All you need is your most recent Twitter-based campaign and these four steps to get started.

Step 1: Get your data, and decide what went well.

Hopefully you set up comprehensive tracking before you launched the start of your campaign, or took something like regular snapshots during its execution in order to track its performance. If you didn’t, don’t panic. We offer premium historical Twitter analytics that can get however much or little campaign information you need from the past into the present. Either way, once you have your data it’s time to dig in and take a look. First, the good news; what went well? Collect your best-performing tweets and set them aside until we get to step 3.

Pay attention to what causes spikes in your reach; did you get a boost from an influencer? Be sure to nurture your relationship with them!

Step 2: Decide what went badly, and ask yourself some honest questions.

Find the tweet that got the lowest engagement, and ask yourself some questions about why its engagement was so low:

Was it the time that you posted it compared to others?

Did it have an image?

Did it have hashtags?

How many hashtags?

Was there an Instagram link without an image directly uploaded to Twitter?

Was there a link to a blog post, but no image or hashtags?

You get the idea. Figure out the common threads between successful tweets, and figure out the common threads between your least successful tweets and base your next campaign’s content off of the former.

Step 3: Utilize specific insights from steps 1 and 2 to decide what you can do better.

From your analysis of what went well and what went not-so-well, choose a set of criteria around which you’ll plan your next campaign. Be sure to include the following:

Time of day: Post during the times that yielded the best results before, and avoid the least-engaged times.

Hashtags: Note the number used in successful tweets, which particular hashtags performed well, and identify some new ones to try out. Did you have a dedicated campaign hashtag? Test one this time around.

Content type (images etc): Did tweets with images perform better? What style of image? Did one style perform better on Twitter vs. Instagram? Were your images and branding cohesive?

Repeated post performance: Did you post the exact same tweet several times, or tweaked versions? Did you use the same content across platforms?

Promotion from team: Did your team help promote the campaign from their personal accounts, where appropriate? Encourage them to do so, or with different tactics in your next campaign.

Promotion from brand advocates: Identify who the biggest influencers and advocates around your campaign were and nurture the relationship. This will make them more likely to be an influencer in your next campaign as well.

Step 4: Plan what to measure with your next campaign.

Once you have your content plans in place, plan what you’re going to track, and how you’re going to track it. Once that campaign has ended, do a side-by-side analysis of the two campaigns to get an even clearer picture of how your fans, followers, and customers engaged with your content. If you do this with every campaign, they can only get stronger.

Social efforts should never live in a vacuum, and successful content marketing efforts and campaigns exist across platforms. Even ventures like launching a Facebook page can be more successful if you track how they are being discussed across other platforms; for example, people don’t just share Facebook news on Facebook, they also talk about it on Twitter.

So when The Theory of Everything- a movie about physicist Stephen Hawking’s life based on a book written by his first wife- recently premiered, and Hawking joined Facebook, we thought we’d take a look at what the conversation about the famous scientist joining Facebook looked like on Twitter. Why? It’s important to understand how your audience is talking about you in every place that they are doing so. Do they say different things about you on Facebook vs. Twitter? Do they share news of you joining a new platform like Facebook, helping you increase your reach and exposure to new potential fans and followers? These are just a few questions you can answer using something like our TweetReach Pro analytics.

How exactly do you monitor a conversation about Facebook on Twitter? Don’t worry, it’s just like setting up any other TweetReach Pro topic Tracker. Your search queries should include the hashtags you’re using on Facebook, Facebook URLs, and other terms to be sure you’re finding the full Twitter conversation about the Facebook content.

Let’s look at some highlights from our analysis below, and a few of the conclusions we drew from it.

Discussion timeline

As with most launches, the peak of the conversation around Hawking joining Facebook came right around the launch itself, then decreased until it saw a small, second peak: The day of the second spike, November 1st, was a Sunday, so that tells you something about this specific audience: Hawking fans spend time talking about him joining Facebook on Sunday, on Twitter, more than a week after it happens. Observing trends over time will tell you if this is an anomaly, or if Hawking fans have broader interests that bring them to Twitter on Sunday; perhaps something like #ScienceSunday.

Influencers to keep an eye on

The top ten contributors to the conversation included a lot of Spanish language accounts and one from Indonesia, which tells you Hawking fans are a global audience and not just limited to his native UK or the ties he has with the US. The most retweeted tweet also came from Spanish language Twitter account Antena3Noticias; the second and third most retweeted tweets about Hawking joining Facebook came from WIRED magazine.

Media outlets joining a discussion around your topic of interest means you can keep them in mind should you want to reach out for a story in the future. These most retweeted tweets and contributors list also tell you that in this case, you shouldn’t limit yourself to US-based media outlets either. The top URLs list confirmed this again, including links from the same Spanish language and Indonesian accounts:

Final takeaways

This is just the insight you get from about week with a TweetReach Pro topic Tracker, looking at one specific launch. But it has already given enough information about the audience and activity times around that launch to inform a content strategy and refocus an audience profile. The bonus takeaway is that science-related content strategies don’t have to be stuffy either: Hawking has a great sense of humor, and so does Twitter.

Stephen Hawking joined Facebook. Oh, the countless things we will never know now bc Stephen Hawking will be wasting time on Buzzfeed quizzes — Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) October 25, 2014

Every time we’ve discussed running a campaign across social media platforms, we’ve emphasized how important it is to tailor content for your audience in each particular space. The kinds of content that perform extremely well on Facebook might not have the same effect on Tumblr, and vice versa. We understand, however, that not every department has the resources to create custom content for each channel. With that in mind we offer these tips for creating content that only requires some tweaking on each platform.

1. Start with visual content.

Visual content is striking and memorable, and it works well on all social media platforms. Even on Twitter, which is typically considered more of a text-based channel, tweets with photos perform better than those that don’t. If you don’t have the time to create custom content for each channel, then start with an image with some visual impact that you can use across social media. You can pair it with different taglines or headlines in each channel (more on that shortly).

2. Choose an image that will have impact across platforms with some simple adjustments.

Keep in mind what types of images work best on each platform. Does your audience respond well to long, vertical images without faces on Pinterest, but engages more with photos that includes faces on Instagram? Work with the same image and crop or edit it so it has maximum impact in each place.

Experiment with text placement, as well. Do photos with text superimposed over them do better on Instagram, or should you leave all the text in the caption? What about on Pinterest, Twitter, or Tumblr? Pay attention to how text placement performs on different social networks, and adjust your plan for the next time.

3. Tweak your tagline for each platform.

Start with some basic copy about your campaign, and then tweak the wording so it works the best in each channel. Keep it short and snappy for Twitter, avoid using a wall of hashtags on Instagram, leave the hashtags off entirely for Facebook, and don’t let the ability to make a long post on Tumblr let you think that’s the best place for it. If you haven’t tested long-form content on Tumblr before, now might not be the best time to do so. Do what’s best for your brand and a particular campaign with the resources that you have. (After the campaign is over? Test away!)

If you have a unique campaign or event hashtag, it’s a good idea to use the same hashtag across social media platforms. But if you’re using more general hashtags to participate in existing conversations, you may want to use different hashtags on different social media sites, even if you’re pairing those tags with the same image across channels.

4. Work from industry research about visual and content copy in each place.

Definitely base your content decisions on the data you collect from your own followers’ engagement, but don’t be afraid to also use what you know more generally about what your target audience likes in each place. Here are some resources to get you started:

The back-to-school crowd these days differs from the Trapper Keepers and Lisa Frank folders of yesteryear in that they’ve grown up not only online, but also on social media. Brands that want to connect with the kids of Generation Z understand this and put themselves in all of the places their target audience spends their time, producing campaigns that connect across Tumblr dashboards and down Instagram timelines, and are amplified across Twitter.

The best: Keds, Teen Vogue, and Hollister team up for back-to-school across platforms

Personal style is a big deal for kids, preteens, and teens working out who they are and who they want to be, and Keds embraced this in their #KedsStyleTrial campaign run in conjunction with Teen Vogue and Hollister. The three week long campaign was officially run via Instagram, but Keds and Teen Vogue also cross-promoted it on their Tumblr and Twitter accounts:

Both also used the same image and similar messaging on their Instagram accounts, while Hollister went with a slightly different approach:

The same is echoed in the Tumblr posts from Teen Vogue and Keds; Hollister doesn’t have a Tumblr, which seems like a mistake given their target demographic and the success of visual content on Tumblr, particularly of the fashionvariety.

How it could be better

Even the best campaigns have room for improvement, and this one could have increased its reach with more participation from Hollister on Twitter, who chose to promote their own separate contest with Pretty Little Liars star Lucy Hale in lieu of this one:

Even a simple retweet of one of the contest promoting tweets from Keds or Teen Vogue’s accounts would have increased reach by putting the content in front of Hollister’s Twitter audience as well.

Other lessons to learn

Another back-to-school campaign on Instagram from Target used the hashtag #firstdayofschool to promote a charity campaign donating school supplies to children in need across America:

What’s the problem? A hashtag like #firstdayofschool is going to be something posted by a wide variety of Instagram users and most of them will probably have no idea that Target’s campaign exists. This leads to difficulty in measurement; your results will be inflated with non-campaign related posts and it will be difficult to tell how successful and far reaching your campaign really was. A hashtag like #KedsStyleTrial works better as it’s unlikely to be generated spontaneously by other Instagram users, and it’s short enough to work when Instagram updates get cross-posted to Twitter (which also boosts your campaign’s reach on that platform).

The bottom line: Pick a hashtag based on your brand name and that’s unique enough not to be spontaneously used by others.

Final lessons

This campaign was planned to be recognizable and accessible to its target audience on the platforms where that audience spends time, which is the crux of any good cross-platform campaign. It was visually based, another plus for its target demographic.

The retail brands also take audience engagement a step further by sharing (or “regramming”) images from fans and followers on their Instagram accounts: Keds with #FanFriday and Hollister with #HCoStyle. That’s an extra incentive for fans and followers to enter the contest– what if they not only win, but also get their Instagram image wearing their winnings shared to either brand’s thousands of followers? Teen Vogue opts not to do this, but it’s a move that fits in with their approachable-yet-still-slightly-aloof fashion magazine brand.

Got it? Good. This will all be on the test, so leave any questions you have in the comments.

Comedy Central now takes requests for its online, sketch series CC: Social Scene, hosted by comedian Paul Scheer. Twitter users can use the hashtag #CCSocialScene to make suggestions based on each week’s topic for a chance to have it included in the next sketch.

This use of a hashtag on Twitter is a natural social extension of the interactive nature of improv and sketch shows at most comedy clubs, taking suggestions from the audience for upcoming scenes. While the episodes haven’t been shared across platforms yet, doing so would maximize exposure to reach each part of their audience where they prefer to spend their time, still drawing them back to Twitter if they wish to participate.

Executing that would make this an excellent example of a cross-platform campaign.

Want tips for running one of those yourself? Check out 3 dos and don’ts for making it work.

About TweetReach

TweetReach is brought to you by Union Metrics. We focus on delivering powerful social analytics that enable marketers to measure and improve their social media campaigns. We provide analytics across Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.

Here on our TweetReach blog, we share our favorite Twitter tactics and strategies, as well as company announcements and events.